Selling dreams

Try sex, shock or sheer glamour

ENGRAVED in the baby-boomer memory is the image of Brooke Shields in 1980, then a provocative 15-year-old dressed in a tight pair of jeans, declaring that “nothing comes between me and my Calvins”. In the week following a blitz of commercials (in one of which Miss Shields claimed, “I've got seven Calvins in my closet, and if they could talk, I'd be ruined”), some 400,000 pairs of Calvin Klein jeans were sold. By the end of that year, Calvin Klein had pocketed $12.5m in royalties from Puritan, the inappropriately named company licensed by Mr Klein to make and sell the jeans.

The connection between sex and fashion is not exactly new. Padded codpieces were the Englishman's fad in the 15th century, and in the 19th century well-bred women in England and France wore extremely décolleté dresses in the thinnest of fabrics. Mr Klein's innovation was to sell the sex in fashion to the masses, through television commercials, giant poster hoardings and advertisements in glossy magazines. One stunt was a 116-page supplement sent out with the October 1991 issue of Vanity Fair. The supplement featured near-naked women and men, exquisitely photographed in provocative poses. Within weeks, sales of Calvin Klein jeans at Bloomingdale's department stores in America had jumped by 30%.

To the naive, using sex to sell clothes might seem to present a problem: sex implies nudity, whereas clothes are about covering up. But a clever advertiser will solve that problem in a trice. For a full-length woman's trench coat, why not have a naked thigh poking out? For a pair of women's trousers, why not pose the model with her legs spread apart, with a hand caressingly close to the crotch? For a pair of high-heeled shoes, why not show the long, lissom leg attached to the foot?

For fragrances, there is no need for such inventiveness: a perfume goes on the skin, so let the advertiser show as much skin as public morals will allow. Four years ago a model, Sophie Dahl, stretched naked (save for her necklace and high-heeled shoes) and in orgasmic ecstasy across magazine pages and hoardings. Her role was to advertise Opium, a perfume from the house of Yves Saint Laurent first launched in 1977. The image was a touch too strong for the British public: after receiving 730 complaints, the Advertising Standards Authority decided to ban the ad, but not before the protests had boosted sales.

That should surprise no one. Clothing is about many things, such as protection from the elements, or functionality—which is why Amelia Jenks Bloomer, an American suffragette, protested in the 1850s against the ludicrously impractical crinoline petticoat and in favour of trousers (hence “bloomers”). But “fashion” is about identity. The young do not want to be bracketed with the old; the rich want to be seen as different from the poor; the “hip” want to separate themselves from the conventional. A prime example is the word-play of a clothing company called French Connection UK. It brands itself as FCUK, close enough to another four-letter word to dismay the older generation and delight the “cool” youngsters who are the 32-year-old company's target market. Whether because of or despite its advertising, the company has done well: its pre-tax profit in the year to January 2003 was £29.5m ($44.7m), compared with £10.4m four years earlier.

Christian Dior's advertising campaigns might also be considered a little close to the wind: it features young women, often drenched in fake sweat, wearing skimpy underwear, incongruously surrounded by handbags. But perhaps Dior's tradition gives it a covering of respectability.

One common criticism of the fashion industry's advertising is that it demeans women, reducing them to sex objects. But men are not exempt. In 1971 Yves Saint Laurent shocked the world by posing nude—except for a pair of spectacles—to promote his perfumes (and perhaps send himself up). Now Lacoste promotes its perfume for men by showing a totally naked hunk sitting in an armchair drinking coffee. This is clearly designed to appeal both to women and to gay men; so, too, the huge billboards in New York's Times Square advertising male underwear.

Yet shock-tactic advertising is not a foolproof recipe for commercial success. Abercrombie & Fitch, a 112-year-old clothes retailer with almost 700 stores across America, has recently kept its quarterly catalogue light on its sweaters, chinos and shirts and heavy on nudity, hoping to appeal to its target audience of college-age youngsters. The pre-Christmas 2003 issue went even further, accompanying a photograph of attractive young people in the buff with the suggestion that group masturbation makes “a pleasant and super-safe alternative” to group fornication.

Parents were deeply offended, which was just what the company was aiming for. But the youngsters seem to have been offended too, perhaps not by the content but by the blatant attempt to manipulate them. The company's December sales were 13% down on a year earlier, and a chastened Abercrombie & Fitch decided to stop publishing its catalogue.

Shock without sex does not necessarily work either. Benetton, an Italian clothing group which has 5,000 stores around the world, is famous for campaigns that have nothing to do with fashion: a 1996 advertisement, for example, showed three hearts (possibly human), labelled “white, black, yellow”; a poster last year, supporting the United Nation's World Food Programme, showed the naked torso of a black man, with a metal prosthetic spoon held out from the stump of his amputated right arm. Yet, for all the brand identity that such campaigns have created, Benetton's financial results have begun to disappoint. The group showed a net loss of euro10m in 2002, compared with a profit of euro243m two years earlier.

Perhaps it is best to rely on sheer glamour to sell your clothes. Certainly, there is an inexhaustible flow of beautiful young women who want to become models and are both skinny and tall (5' 9”, or 1.76m, is the ideal). Indeed the flow has become a torrent since girls from former communist countries have been free to seek their fortunes in the West. Yet only a few have the ability to mesmerise the camera lens, and not all of those will fall within the conventional modelling guidelines.

Model business

Britain's supermodel Kate Moss was spotted at JFK airport as a waif-like 14-year-old by Sarah Doukas, founder of London's Storm modelling agency, and it has never worried the agency's clients that Ms Moss grew to be only 5'8” tall (some say less). In 2001, Burberry's chief executive declared that “getting our bikini on Kate Moss cut the average age of our customers by 30 years in one fell swoop.”

But appearing beautiful is a labour-intensive business. You need a fashion editor to plan the cover, and a fashion stylist to find a location, set the mood and decide on the look of make-up and hair. You need a hairdresser, a make-up expert, a manicurist. And, of course, you need a photographer. Get everything right and sales rise all round, from the magazine to the lipstick and the nail-varnish.

That is all the more true if the cover features a celebrity rather than a model. Last December the film star Renée Zellweger, looking languid in a Prada dress, was the cover model for American Vogue; last month she dressed in a crimson silk strapless gown from Carolina Herrera for the cover of Harper's Bazaar. Actresses such as Ms Zellweger or Jennifer Aniston (another recent Vogue cover) seem more real to the average woman than an emaciated, extra-leggy model (see article).